"If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of Mankind; indeed, this seems to be a psychological and sociological law; the power of some needs the folly of others..." - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, "Letters and Papers From Prison"
Reverend Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor in Germany during the rise of the Third Reich. His writings against the Nazis made him an enemy of the State, and so he was interned in a concentration camp in 1943, and eventually executed -- when he was suspected of being a ringleader in the July Bomb Plot to assassinate Hitler.
An interesting fellow -- and I wish I could expound upon him more on this page -- but what I'm really interested in talking about today is one of his better-known works, which has come down to us as The Theory of Stupidity.
Rather than give a lengthy explanation of this theory, I have included a link above to a rather informative, if short, video. Specifically, what I'm interested in was Bonhoeffer's recognition that once mass stupidity had reached a certain level, there was literally no chance of using reason to combat any un-reason.
I was reminded of this dictum this past week by a few events, in and of themselves perhaps insignificant, but when taken as whole represent the depths to which a good many in the United States have become, literally, impossible to reason with.
I'll just outline, very quickly, four of those events, just so that you can get a feel for what Bonhoeffer was aiming at.
The first involves the upcoming mayoral election here in New York City.
Essentially, your choice this November of who gets to add another shovel of dirt on the grave of this once-great city, comes down to this:
* An avowed anti-Semite, Muslim supporter of Islamic terrorism who happens to be personally very wealthy (through no action of his own) playing at 'democratic socialist', screaming about 'an affordability crisis' in the city, assuming the role of champion of the Proletariat while pushing policies that have been literally tired and failed all over the world in a hundred places for over a hundred years, while professing affinity with the 'oppressed', who do not exist, and who are more-likely to be oppressors than anyone else (Muslims, gays, blacks, trans, etc).
He is a foreigner; raised in Africa, descendant of a college professor father who thinks Saddam Hussein was a martyr, and an artsy-fartsy mother who has won several awards for movies you wouldn't pay someone else to watch for you. A failed 'rapper' and State Assemblyman (who missed 90% of his votes in the Assembly), who has never held a real job in his life.
His mission appears to be to turn Manhattan into a college quad (his best support comes from the 'educated', downwardly-mobile class - artists, activists, those who hold useless degrees related to race, gender and unnatural uses for your sexual organs -- and the rest of the city into his native Uganda.
* A former Governor, State Attorney General and Secretary of HUD whose main talents appear to be graft, crime, dissembling, groping the hired hands and collecting multi-million dollar book royalties and Emmy awards while killing an estimated 15,000 elderly people with COVID.
Andrew Cuomo is a repulsive man, in all respects.
His list of various scams and abuses of his power is legendary -- and long. Another of the turds that fell out of the Clintonian shit factory, his only other claim to fame was that his father, Mario, was only slightly less-shitty as governor. If ever there was such a thing a 'nepo babies' the Cuomo boys are the poster children. Neither is very appealing, particularly smart or effective and if it wasn't for the political shadow cast by their father (a revered figure in NY politics), one can picture the both of them living in a two bedroom walkup in a crappy neighborhood, drinking cheap beer, smoking cheap cigars, decked out in wife-beaters and velour sweatpants, taking the occasional violent swipe at their wives and children.
The sole Republican in the race, Curtis Sliwa, barely rates mention. He has a lower chance of success in this race than Kamala's IQ (more on her in a moment).
And while I know a goodly number of native New Yorkers, just like myself, who are completely disgusted with this sorry state of affairs -- you can vote for either Osama Bin Laden in an expensive suit, or Adolf Eichmann with snazzy power point presentations -- the only real questions to be asked are which one is the least offensive and which one will do the least amount of damage?
How you manage to arrive at this choice of immediate suicide by multiple gunshot wounds or a slow process of poisoning becomes central to the whole thing.
Talk to any liberal in this city and will soon discover two things: the first being that they have no connection with physical reality. Their heads are stuffed to overflowing with lofty ideals detached from anything approaching logic. The second will be just how monumentally insane these people are. You cannot present them with facts -- they regard these as either dangerous or outright lies. You cannot argue with them because they have invested everything in their entire being in defending the indefensible, the alternative being that their bubble of unreality being popped and the sudden realization -- which has to be followed by admission -- that these idiots are not very bright.
There are two things no liberal can tolerate -- the first is being shown to be a moron and the second is to be mocked for it.
New York City is NOT the place you want to be shown to be a drooling, smooth-brained dunderhead. The relentless rubbing of your nose in your own puddle of stupidity would be enough to drive you to suicide.
One you would hope the City and State would pick up the tab for, of course.
The second is a pair of functional illiterates pushing books that no one wants to read.
The Dynamic Duo of Kamala Harris and Karine Jean-Pierre are polluting the airwaves and sucking up valuable newsprint flogging 'insider' accounts of what really happened inside the Biden Administration. In all the interviews, however, we get the distinct impression that either was lucky to be let inside of anything, let alone the White House or the (P)resident's inner circle, because the yarns they spin defy believability.
Kamala is still making the case that she lost, alternately, because her campaign was too short and that Donald Trump told the more-believable lies. She still defends Joe Biden as being a great president, making the ridiculous distinction that while Joe was too feeble to run for the office again, he was still capable of doing the job.
Jean-Pierre's schtick is to remind you, constantly, that she is a black, female queer, believing this means she does not have to answer the central thesis of her pile of wasted paper that Joe Biden was in full control of his faculties (and bowels) the entire time he was in the commander's chair and, really, although the books is about Biden, it is somehow all about Trump.
Both are shining examples of what you get when you let DEI override your critical thinking skills. Or, more-accurately, when your critical thinking skills abandoned you several decades ago.
Neither has any particular talent, nor do wither display any sort of ability, whatsoever. Their 'appeal' to the Left was simply black, female, gay, the Holy Trinity of Diversity, if you will, and a belief that those features makes one virtuous and qualified for anything in this country within leftist precincts is guarded as if it were Holy Scripture.
Both are symptoms of a mass stupidity, a trading of mere appearances for effectiveness or qualification, that permeates the environment whenever three or more lefties assemble anywhere. To believe that either woman is smart -- Kamala can't complete a coherent sentence; Karine read from a binder for a few years -- requires a great deal of mental gymnastics; to believe that the results are somewhat praiseworthy requires a denial of Objective Reality.
To continue to defend them after the utter uselessness of either has been made manifest requires a level of stupidity that cannot be measured and which defies any logical penetration.
And we all know how much the one likes penetration and the other avoids it.
The Stupid passes from a merely intellectual defense mechanism to a religious catechism within the Church of Woke.
Finally, we had the example of Gavin Newsome (more like 'Noisome') going on the internet with a bunch of former NBA players describing his hardscrabble adolescence.
You know, the one that saw the son of a lawyer raising himself as a latchkey kid on a steady diet of boxed mac-and-cheese and Wonder Bread before opening his own wine business at age 20 with someone else's money.
Because all ghetto kids own their own vineyards.
This is an exercise that someone recently referred to as a 'poorigin' story, that is to say, a re-writing of reality to appear to be as pedestrian -- and proletarian -- as any denizen of the ghetto, despite living in tony neighborhoods and attending the finest schools, courtesy of wealthy parents.
Alexandria Ocascio-Cortez rode this sham origin story to electoral gain, pretending to be a true Puerto Rican from the mean streets of The Bronx, despite being raised from the age of 5 upwards in one of the most-expensive suburbs of all of New York State, attending the very-expensive Boston University, and then failing at capitalism on borrowed money despite having a degree in economics.
Certainly the character arc of the true boriqua from the barrio.
Mamdani is attempting the same, despite the fact that his family has its own 'compound' in Uganda and he lives in a rent-controlled apartment in a fashionable, upscale neighborhood.
Newsome is something of a chameleon, changing his looks, policies, ideas and even his wardrobe to the environment he finds himself in right now. He's not very good at it, either, because he comes across as essentially a richer, dumber and slicker Justin Trudeau.
And that is a quality that everyone here has in spades; none of them is authentic. None of them is believable. They are poor actors playing a very badly-written role in a third-rate dinner theater production in Paduca or Boise.
But, there are those, because Stupidity in all of its forms, who believe these people are somehow superstars, viable politicians, perhaps even future Presidents, chock full of ideas that are somehow either brand new (because denial) or which haven't been given a realistic chance since Marx shat them out (because refusal to acknowledge failures).
They give proof to Bonhoeffer's dictum that the power of some requires the folly of others.
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